Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday May 02, 2013 @11:50AM
from the straight-from-the-source dept.

John McAfee was best known as a software designer and founder of the computer anti-virus company McAfee Associates until his saga in Belize began. McAfee's works on producing natural antibiotics commercially in Belize was quickly overshadowed by police raids, murder allegations, and a month of evading Belizean authorities while maintaining his innocence. He was eventually captured and deported back to the United States in December 2012 without being charged with any crime. "Boston George" Jung (a man who has lived quite an unusual life himself) has been tapped to write McAfee's biography titled, No Domain. Now that things have mostly settled down, John has agreed to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Where is Sam? I understand that she risked a lot, and can be credited largely with saving your life. What happened to her when you surrendered to authorities, and what are the current efforts being made to secure her safety? What are the prospects for allowing her legal immigration status to the United States? When is she in her own reality series on cable?

Are you fucking kidding me? Who wouldn't run when faced against the thuggery of modern law enforcement?
Running has *nothing* to do with guilt or innocence, and everything to do with an extreme and quite rational aversion to being ensnared and railroaded into a ruinous legal situation.

While you were moving around, Vice.com got to spend time with you [vice.com]. If memory serves me, it was later revealed that the image they uploaded with you had GPS data that you then claimed to be spoofed. Coincidentally the news styled documentary they were going to do with you never seemed to surface... now that things have died down can you give more context to that whole situation?

Doesn't it bother you that your name is being used to peddle one of the worst anti-virus products on the market? Often it comes pre-installed on computers as a 30 day trial (crapware), with dire warnings flashed up in the event that the user fails to pay (scareware). The performance hit it brings is huge. Would you advise anyone else to name their product/company after themselves in this way?

Personally, I'd rather have a real virus than install McAfee, but download.com and softpedia.com's users rate their stuff at 3 or 4 out of 5. Beats me, but could be the placebo effect, or maybe it's better than many of us think (not that that's saying much) ?

Also the infection vector is just a little bit less bad than common malware. You have to be extra hawkeyed to spot all the checkboxes it might lurk beneath. It ranks just there with browser toolbars and monkey punchers.

McAfee antivirus was never particularly impressive from a technical point of view. McAfee's brightest moments in his career were when he basically took something known in other industries and applied to obvious places in computing.

I don't even think the US patent office would call what he did non-trivial.

I think you are being a bit unfair here. While Mr. McAfee's ideas may see commonplace now after twenty-five years of having anti-virus software, at the time he applied them, it was quite novel. Also, the programs that Mr. McAfee was responsible for in the DOS era (SENTRY, VIRUSCAN, CLEAN-UP, VSHIELD, etc.) were pretty much state-of-the-art at that time.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

At Thursday May 02, 2013 @07:16PM, BitZtream (692029) wrote:>> McAfee antivirus was never particularly impressive from a

Almost exactly one year ago your dog was killed (my sympathies), your passport was confiscated and your house searched by a Gang Suppression Unit (GSU) while you lived in Belize [channel5belize.com]. Why not publicly name names and provide as much detailed evidence as possible to reveal this horrible corruption and abuse of something that is supposed to stop crime? Who was it that tried to extort political money from you? Is there anyway to verify?

You should never talk to the police or comment on an ongoing case, there is no benefit for doing so. Even when you are completely innocent you can still risk incriminating your self. Here is a link to a 40 minute video on why is it never in you benifit to talk to police.Don't Talk to the police [youtube.com].

If I understand correctly, this whole episode began because a local politician visited you in your home and he had the expectation (for whatever reason) that you would pay him USD $30,000 as some kind of protection money for his campaign and your expectation was that politicians are supposed to work for people and not the other way around. Is this a reasonable characterization? If so, how do you think such a large missmatch in expectations came about? Do you think you were overly naive? Or is the political environment in Belize changing? I can easily believe that this might be the normal expected way that people do business down there based on other things I've heard, but I really have no idea. Now that you've had time to reflect, what would you say was responsible for the conflict in the first place?

If Minecraft is something you refuse to live without, then maybe people like you can lobby the vendor for a version that doesn't use Java. But, take it from a person who has never played Minecraft: you can live without it.

I'm a huge fan of MDPV. Not the white hydrochloride - it's inconceivable that anyone on the planet would willingly put that into their bodies -- I'm talking the freebase form. I think many of you that don't bother to freebase it yourself have at least tasted the freebase version when it was widely available as "tan mdpv". I think it's the finest drug evere conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality, but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown.

Do you still stick to this opinion? Are you sure it's the finest drug ever conceived? If you're unwavering in that view, what would you rank as the second or third drugs in the chemical hall of fame?

There are a lot of other ways to protect a system from malware than signature scanning. In fact, I would go as far as to say this technology is outmodded. With the considerable resources available to your company, why aren't you guys developing whitelists to validate executable code on a workstation and building a trusted computing platform so only executable code which has been verified can be executed?

Vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe, etc., do release many versions of their software, but these versions ca

Which brings back the dancing bunnies problem [codinghorror.com]. The user sees "Add our PPA to see dancing bunnies", the user gets the home PC's administrator to do so, and the system is compromised. Or the user is a software developer, but he's tired of having to retype his code signing key's passphrase every single time he rebuilds his project, so he takes the passphrase off the key. Now any malware can sign itself as the user.

Tripwire was created in the 80s, when it was. And the company still has his name on the door... he's involved, even if he isn't the owner anymore, Einstein. But apparently, Slashdot wants to ask him potentially incriminating questions about his personal life instead of talking about the technology.

You guys should be ashamed to call yourselves nerds. This is crap for People magazine, not a tech news site.

He has had no involvement in the company in years. McAfee was bought out by intel. Intel wants nothing to do with someone who in his prime wasn't particularly impressive, and is 30 years past his prime and rants and raves like a 17 year old emo hopped up on coke and ecstasy.

"Boston George" Jung (a man who has lived quite an unusual life himself) has been tapped to write McAfee's biography titled, No Domain.

I don't get it. Jung is a convicted drug smuggler. You have had no such charges ever filed against you (to my knowledge) by the United States so, if nothing more than a publicity stunt, why did you pick him to write your biography? If you feel you are wrongly accused, I can understand why you would pick someone wrongly accused to write your biography -- they can relate. But George Jung was certainly a key part of Pablo Escobar's deadly and pervasive criminal organization. You are (again, to my knowledge) far from that so why bait the readers with that author as a link? I have had very little associations with you and illegal drug activity but now I think you view yourself as a modern George Jung, am I wrong in making this assumption?

What are your thoughts on using a HOSTS file to help minimize your exposure to computer malware and protect your system? This seems to be a topic of HUGE debate here at SlashDot. Here's hoping an expert can chime in for once!

Ars Technica ran an inditing article [arstechnica.com] on your sanity in which you made statements on the virtues of MDPV (bath salts), having three informants in the Zeta Cartel and also informants in Nicaragua that had made contact with Hezbollah's camp. To put my question succinctly: what the hell, man? Where have your James "Psychonaut" Bond travels taken you to recently?

Back in The Day the name McAfee was significant and even important: the first (maybe, haven't looked it up) and certainly the most effective anti-virus product (and free!) when those sorts of problems first began.

Since then, he's just another rich guy who now has managed to get into serious trouble. Not interested, got problems of my own. Which don't involve being suspected of shooting my neighbor or evading local police, thanka verra much.

How widespread is it for companies to actually be the creators of the virusses just to create fear/demand for their antivirus products? ( By creating a virus, I mean everything from naming of non-existent virusses right through to actually developing real virusses).

You claimed in a roundabout fashion that the Mexican Drug Cartels are assisting Hezbollah terrorists to make their way into the USA with a bunch of deadly poison, possibly tons of ricin. If this is true and not another distraction technique, then what are they planning to do with all that nasty shit? Are they planning bio-attacks on US citizens? If they are planning attacks with ricin in the USA, why do you not tell more people and get the word out to save lives?

Before you were forced to leave Belize, you were in the process of researching topical antibiotic creams. How far along was that research? Had you found any promising compounds, ready to go to trials, etc., or was still more towards the basic research end of things?

As a follow-up question, if you are able to return to Belize, will you continue this avenue of research?

I know this is kind of a two-part question, but I am hoping you'll still be able to answer.